It’s essential to keep your building cool during the summer. Whether you need to keep your data center cool for proper functioning, or you need to ensure a comfortable climate for your customers, clients or residents, proper cooling tower maintenance is a responsibility you shouldn’t avoid.
Developing a plan for maintenance is a crucial aspect of minimizing cost and maximizing efficiency for your cooling units during the summer. Performing proper maintenance helps to keep your condenser temperatures low while creating much better energy efficiency.
By following a few key procedures during the summer, you can maximize your equipment’s life span and ensure it functions at its best all summer long:
Why Maintaining Cooling Tower Is Important During the Summer
The searing heat of the summer months can cause a lot of extra stress on your cooling systems. If these systems are not properly maintained, this stress can cause damage, increase costs, and reduce the lifespan of the cooling tower itself. This reduction in efficiency can lead to a lot of unforeseen damages to the equipment which creates issues downstream in the machinery.
Cooling towers are sensitive pieces of machinery. During the summer months, the ambient heat in the air makes these machines much more prone to wear and tear. They can actually become “fatigued” and grow less efficient over time. It is crucial that downstream equipment receives water that is cooled to the optimal temperature, or else other aspects of the downstream machinery – such as Chillers, absorbers, heat exchangers, AC units and other process loops – cannot properly function.
Maintenance Tips To Prepare Your Cooling Tower for Summer
Proper maintenance of your cooling tower equipment is the most important way that you can ensure optimal efficiency throughout even the harshest of summer heat waves. Here are a few tips from the pros on how you can do this:
Proper Water Treatment
Cooling tower water needs to be treated and disinfected on a regular and ongoing basis. This is necessary in order to prevent the harmful buildup of bacteria and other substances that can, if not removed, damage the cooling tower’s equipment.
Water treatment systems contain a wide variety of mechanisms and tools that help to keep the purity of the water up to a certain standard. These standards can vary depending on the type of equipment you run and the level of purity that they require. Also bacterial films have insulating qualities further preventing heat exchange and lowering efficiency.
When your water treatment is not maintained with proper care, blockages occur and will damage equipment over time. This leads to less efficient cooling tower performance. For example, it can cause water to not be cooled to the proper temperature, leading to both equipment strain as well as additional, future malfunctions.
Clean and Maintain
While the water itself needs to be treated and cleaned often to prevent harmful bacterial buildup, the same goes for the machine itself! According to industry standard guidelines, you should have procedures in place that call for routine cleaning and disinfecting at an absolute minimum of twice a year. In most cases, 3-4 cleaning sessions are recommended for cooling towers.
This is especially true during the hot summer months. Disinfecting the equipment prevents algae from growing and reduces the chance that Legionella growth does not overtake your equipment. This harmful bacteria can cause serious illness, such as the potentially fatal Legionnaires’ disease, and is a major detriment to any cooling tower operation.
Calibrate Equipment
Keeping the equipment in your cooling tower suitably calibrated makes a big difference in how well it functions. The temperature sensors, for example, control almost every aspect of the downstream machinery. If these sensors are not calibrated, then you could be losing operational efficiency and eating more costs during the more demanding summer months.
There are also valves and flow sensors that monitor the flow to and from the equipment. If these are not calibrated or adjusted for precision, the flow rate could end up being less than ideal and result in a loss of efficiency as well.
Establish Routine Inspections
Keeping all of these maintenance needs in line requires a close eye. This is why it is very important to schedule routine monthly maintenance checks on all of the key aspects of your equipment. Be sure to check the belts, fans, nozzles, pumps, thermostats, and any other key pieces within your machinery as outlined by the documentation or protocols.
Maintain Cost-Efficiency All Summer Long
Keeping your costs stable and your equipment running at optimum capacity during the summer months requires attention and following these tips listed above. By keeping a close eye on the maintenance and upkeep of your machinery, you can easily keep your cooling tower running at its highest capacity all summer long.
For more information on best practices for keeping your costs low and efficiency high when running your cooling tower this summer, schedule a consultation with our team of experts at Tower Water or call us at 212-518-6475.
